Previews

Stormrise

The Creative Assembly is making big claims with its upcoming console RTS.

Spiffy:

Intricate maps that suggest the possibility for varied, multi-front battles.

Iffy:

We're not fully convinced that the control scheme will as manageable as the developer purports.

Recent history is full of console RTS ports falling over themselves in an effort to, at best, recreate something marginally evocative of the PC experience. But Vispi Bhopti, The Creative Assembly's Communications Manager, contends that Stormrise's control scheme -- which was designed from the get-go around a gamepad -- is an honest-to-goodness improvement over the mouse and keyboard. These are big words. I don't recall the developers of the voice-controlled EndWar's making those presumptions, and if anyone is entitled to, it would probably be them.

Stormrise will remind you of Full Spectrum Warrior. You view the battle from the perspective of the unit you have selected, which usually means "third-person," unless you've selected one that flies, in which case you get a bird's-eye-view. Unlike Full Spectrum Warrior, however, you control a force much larger than a handful of fireteams; in terms of numbers, Stormrise brings traditional RTS-sized armies to the field. The difficulties inherent to managing forces this large with a gamepad are where most console ports fall apart. And this is precisely what Bhopti says that Stormrise's "whip select" control scheme will remedy.

If nothing else, the "whip select" scheme definitely appears flexible. Every one of your units, regardless of how far away, is represented by an icon. In order to select it, you simply "whip" the control stick in its direction. In the case of two unit icons being too close to one another, Bhopti promises that the whip select's fine-tuning will typically result in your intended target being selected. (I didn't have a chance to play, but TeamXbox's Tom Price did, and he told me that his experience didn't quite bear this out.) Other kinds of supplemental functionality are built into the system. For instance, you can issue a movement command to a distant unit while you have another selected, which seems to work most effectively when you're looking down on the battlefield from a flying unit. And you can also assign multiple units into a single group, in order to keep the array of onscreen icons manageable.

When talking about Stormrise's maps, Bhopti brought up terms like "verticality" and "layer cake." The latter described what he feels is a crucial expression of the game's level design. Unlike most of the RTS games we're familiar with, Stormrise isn't built around a flat plane scattered with obstacles. Rather, many of its maps are layered; one map that Bhopti flew through had a multi-level parking garage, a subterranean tunnel system, and an army-sized warehouse built into it. The point he was trying to drill home during this portion of the demo was that, regardless of where you are (or what your current point of view is), it's almost impossible to get a full spatial picture of your surroundings. In the case of the army-sized warehouse, an enemy who decides to actually stash an army in it will easily foil you if you dismiss it as empty offhand.

When you consider what this notion of "verticality" could mean for navigating this world of "layer cakes," Bhopti's hyping of the "whip select" scheme starts to maybe seem a bit more credible. But chew on this: Stormrise's PC version will ship with a specially-designed mouse and keyboard scheme. According to Bhopti, the team (which includes quite a few recruited pro gamers) is currently wrestling with a few iterations of it. These days, it's common for PC ports to come with keyboard commands built-in, regardless of how absurd it would be to actually play the game that way (see: Devil May Cry 4). But it light of Bhopti's bold statements, shipping the PC version without mouse and keyboard controls would have spoken volumes.

Sega and the Creative Assembly are promising us another look at Stormrise not long after the new year. It'll be particularly interesting to see how the multiplayer component is shaping up.